Produced by a pre-war cultural organization in Japan, the film is a work of great clarity and beauty which follows an entire pottery-making cycle as performed in Japan for centuries. Mashiko ceramic manufacture is said to date back to 1853. Also shown at work is the great painter of teapots, Masu Minagawa, an itinerant, illiterate painter of patterns who travelled amongst the kilns in villages. It is said that she decorated up to one thousand teapots per day. Some of her very rare drawings on paper are now held at the Fogg Art Museum in Massachusetts. The film was restored for re-release by Marty Gross.
Filter Films
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Presented as an autobiography, “Mary Mary” interweaves the political with the mythical; visual and textual “quotes” from other films with fragments of children’s stories; and dreams and memories with history. “M” is an ambiguous figure: an English-Canadian woman filmmaker struggling with the representational structures that form and are formed by her as she tries to make a film. At first her script eludes her. Locked in her room, she becomes tangled in a web of memories, images and stories, quotations and histories. Yet even within these confines (narrative and psychic, as well as architectural) the possibility of new readings is implied. Finally, the need to speak itself – via existing ( and thus, available) representational systems – becomes so urgent, that M’s stasis is overcome. She actively immerses herself in the stories, and traverses the spaces that up to now have only haunted her. Central to the possibility of forming new readings, the film suggests, is an attention to, and engagement with, memories, histories and stories, and to the long-silenced voices that have recounted these. In the case of this particular Canadian woman’s story, these are the voices of native peoples in their quest for self determination, of mothers and grandmothers, and of forgotten personal experiences. The self that is finally represented is specific, though not unique; implicity feminist; and politically implicated in the lives and struggles of others – past present and future. Screenings/Awards: Images Festival 1989; official selection for the 1st Exhibition of Experimental Cinema, ARCO Feria International Film Festival 1990; New Works Showcase, Princess Court, Kingston
Mary Mary
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Mary is a kind of everygirl, living with her parents’ constant battling, but able only to deal with the kid stuff – the boy who picks on her at school, the embarrassment her best friend causes. I liked the kitschy ‘70s setting. It kind of reminded me, because I lived through that era, of the stuff I had to deal with when I was little. (VR)
Mary
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Although made in 1993, this film languished for several years as the filmmaker attempted various remakes during 1994-95. Eventually he decided to preserve the original version and to allow the new experiments a place in the subsequent films, “You Take The High Road” and “We Are Experiencing ….” Luckily the filmmaker’s parents had kept a VHS video version of the original film, otherwise it would have been impossible to cobble together the various film elements from memory alone. The film marks the filmmaker’s first use of the optical printer as a tool for image manipulation and layering. The film is notable for its rich saturated colours and, in particular, for the layered combinations of autumn leaves, water surface tension, latticed windows and the human form.
Architectures Landscapes
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An enchanting portrait of Marc and Ann Savoy, Cajun musicians who are dedicated to the preservation and continuance of Cajun culture. Marc is an irreverent storyteller and accordion maker; his wife Ann is the mother of four, and author of the book “Cajun Music: Reflection of a People.”
Marc & Ann
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“Having recently completed his monumental film cycle, ‘The Book of All the Dead,’ Elder begins a new cycle – ‘The Book Of Praise’ – with ‘A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy.’ Elder believes that, by using speed and by creating constructions which incorporate a number of attractions that contend with each other for attention, a filmmaker can produce a form of experience that bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the body and the senses. Accordingly, he creates dense, elaborate films that make use of intricate montage construction, complex collage (combining simultaneous multiple images) and layered sound construction. In his new film, Elder depicts forms of life that have grown increasingly out of touch with the body, and attempts to elicit and experience of the delight that results from reconnecting with our natural being.” – Cinematheque Ontario, March 1998 “There arose within me a new sense, a delight still physical (since understanding had no role in it). But all animation ceased, not in torpor, but in bliss. Each spacious moment seemed to exist apart from succession, and from all that is successive, as a temporal form of eternity. Space no longer stretched away from the body, but so filled up with sense of place no difference from my sense of my own body. Shadow willingly entered into the clutch of light, and all was radiant. The worm that eats the rose departed.” – R. Bruce Elder “The sun has left his blackness and has found a fresher morning, And the mild moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night, And Man walks forth from midst of the fires: the evil is all consum’d. His eyes behold the Angelic spheres arising night and day; The stars consum’d like a lamp blown out in their stead, behold The Expanding Eyes of Man behold the depths of wondrous worlds! One Earth, one sea beneath; nor Erring Globes wander, but Stars Of fire rise up nightly from the Ocean; and one Sun Each morning, like a New born Man, issues with songs and joy Calling the Plowman to his labour and the Shepherd to his rest. …The hammer of Urthona sounds In the deep caves beneath; his limbs renew’d, his Lions roar Around the furnaces and in Evening sport upon the plains. They raise their faces from the Earth, conversing with the Man: How is it we have walk’d thro’ fires and yet are not consum’d? How is it that all things are chang’d, even as in ancient times?’” – from William Blake’s Vala, or The Four Zoas, “Night the Ninth”
Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy, A
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Jack Deller, a professor of Foucauldian and Lacanian theory, is left by his artist-wife after four years of marriage. Deller is played by two actors; the wife is never seen. Her voice is heard throughout – it governs the film. The camera pursues him on the image track, while her voice pursues her train of thought. The structure of the film is elaborated in a constant interweaving of fiction and documentary, narrative and theory, amidst issues of sexuality, aging, power relations, and political activism.
Man Who Envied Women, The
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“The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough” uses literary, structural, autobiographical and performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images; a physical, almost choreographic sense of camera movement; and massive, resonant sound have inspired critics to call it “stunning” and “hallucinatory.” The film ranges in subject from a solar eclipse shot off the coast of Africa to a hand-held filmed ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves, in spirit, from the deeply personal to the mythic. “…miraculous… charged with expectancy… his fastidious gaze lends his subjects the colour of myth and they spread in the viewer’s mind like a fabulous dream.” – Mark Stivers, WXPN Express “…contrasts optical printing with screen imagery as beautifully and poetically as I’ve seen. The film is all about seeing, about magic and about the relationship between film and the eye.” – Owen Shapiro “…mixes words and images with strong grace, exploring ways in which vision can overpower us… stunning.” – Phillip Anderson, Minneapolis City Pages “…a powerful formal, analytic inquiry into the very nature of vision and cinema… painfully beautiful images of mysterious events and things, images that split, multiply, migrate and quiver with a hallucinatory vibrancy… a rich fabric interlacing the metaphysical with the ironical.” – Sally Banes, Village Voice Collections: Donnell Film Library; Oberhausen Film Collection; Simon Frazer University; Australian National Film Archive; South Carolina Arts Commission; California Institute of the Arts
Man Who Could Not See Far Enough, The
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Rather than looking outward, and creating a spherical universe around itself (e.g. Michael Snow’s “La Region Centrale” ), the camera is introspective, defining itself by how it “sees the world”; it never sees anything but itself. “A Man in the Box” is a camera’s photographic memory, trying to focus upon its own image. We realize that we see only what we want to see – that how we decide to see determines how we will see. Dedicated to Bill Wees, my eye’s mentor. Film to be screened twice, once forwards, and once backwards. (RR)
Man in the Box, A
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Note: This film is a companion piece to “A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea.” This film begins with a series of horizontally running ocean tide waves, sometimes with mountains in the background, hand-painted patterns, sometimes step-printed hand-painted patterns, sometimes step-printed hand-painting, abstractions composed of distorted (jammed) T.V. shapes in shades of blue with occasional red, refractions of light within the camera lens, sometimes mixed reflections of water – this “weave” of imagery occasionally revealing recognizable shapes of birds and humans, humans as fleeting figures in the water, as distant shapes in a rowboat, as human shadows, so forth. Increasingly closer images of water, and of light reflected off water, as well as of bursts of fire, intersperse the long shots, the seascapes and all other interwoven imagery. Eventually a distant volley ball arcs across the sky filled with cumulus clouds: this is closely followed by, and interspersed with, silhouettes of a young man and woman in the sea, which leads to some extremely out-of-focus images from a front car window, an opening between soft-focus trees, a clearing. Carved wooden teeth suddenly sweep across the frame. Then the film ends on some soft-focus horizon lines, foregrounded by ocean, slowly rising and falling and rising again in the frame. (SB)
Mammals of Victoria, The
